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Volhynia
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GROWING UP in SHUMSK:
an Interview Transcribed by Lynne
Tolman Zeev Berg was interviewed on tape by American second cousin Marlyn Katz Levenson around 1986 in Brookline, Massachusetts: Born
in 1919, Zeev grew up in Shumsk, Poland (now Ukraine).
Childhood nickname
was Velvel or Velvel-eh, the diminutive of "wolf," and he didn't
like this name because it rhymes with kelvel (?). He
said the name Shumsk came from "the sound of shivering trees, shhhhhh..." Zeev's
father used to wear a hat while eating; that was a Jewish habit. On Shabbes you were not allowed to work -- you couldn't shine your shoes or
carry anything in your pockets or carry a candle, etc.
There was a “shiksa” (non-Jewish
woman) who would come in the morning to take off the kettle and heat the
oven. She would be given a
stick of challah, and probably other payment as well.
On
Fridays they'd have latkes and papalkes
(like pita, but darker and tastier -- a real treat).
There was a huge clay-brick wood-fueled oven for baking bread. Typically houses had a nook above the oven that was nice and
warm and where a child could sleep. Marlyn remembers her father saying he
slept in such a nook. Zeev's
maternal grandfather lived in the same house.
He would come home from the community bathhouse red as a beet, with
his skin all wrinkled like a raisin, and Zeev's mother would give him
several glasses of hot tea with sugar.
She'd line them up all at once for him to drink because he'd be so
thirsty he'd drink them very quickly.
Men would go to the bath every Friday, year-round. There
was a bathhouse for women, too, but Zeev didn't remember his mother Zeev
remembered his father chopping ice from the river in winter.
They'd keep it in a special basement all summer, wrapped in straw.
Zeev remembered the man who came to dig this basement. He was preparing to make aliyah
to Israel so, [as Zeev put
it], he wanted to "train" by doing this hard work himself, not
hiring “goyim” (non-Jewish
men). This man's father was the
melamed
(teacher) of the cheder that
Zeev attended in Shumsk. Except
on Friday, the main meal was midday.
Typically there was yoech
(broth), and sometimes there was chopped liver, chopped hard-boiled eggs,
cold beans chopped with onions. Then
a piece of meat, but not every day. Kasha.
Mashed potatoes maybe twice a week.
In the evening, supper would be eggs or something; blintzes on
Shavuos. On
Shabbat there would be fish and fleisch
(meat), with a dish of water in between to wash up. The Shabbes challah was magnificent, with 12 strands
representing the 12 tribes of Israel.
"We loved to pull off the heads.
You can't find it now except in Jerusalem." On
Purim there was a lot of noise, and special sweets. (Marlyn's father used to tell of people writing "Haman"
on the soles of their shoes so they could erase it by walking on it.) Zeev
said there were no drunkhouses in the vicinity but on Purim it was a
mitzvah to get drunk. There
was a big man who'd get going on vodka and dance on the tables to
entertain everyone. Then Zeev added he wasn't sure if this was his memory
or something he read. "Sometimes
my memory gets mixed up with Sholom Aleichem stories." Zeev
went to cheder (Jewish school)
twice a week. Men davened every morning, many at the shul, but Zeev's father davened
at home, with tfillin. On Shabbat and chagim
(holidays) they went to shul. Their
social contacts were with other Jews, not Poles or Ukrainians, but there
were business connections with non-Jews.
One year Zeev went to a non-Jewish school.
It cost 9 zlotys a year -- about $9, he said -- to send him to
school. The
shtetl had lots of tiny shops, selling sewing supplies and farming
supplies. The farmers around there were not Jews; Jews were not allowed to
farm. There were little pubs (kreichmir). Zeev
remembered that families would receive $5 for Pesach and $5 for Rosh
Hashanah, from relatives who had emigrated around the turn of the century.
When Zeev was nearly 14 he left for Warsaw, and attended a teachers
college there for Jewish men. He
said this college was a bone the Polish government threw to the Jews,
"lip service." During
school he only came home once a year. Probably
because he was so young at the time, he was a little unclear on the drama
that was unfolding concerning his mother's first cousin Max Katzop [Marlyn's
father], who had emigrated to Philadelphia about 1928.
Zeev's mother's father was responsible for a house in Shumsk that belonged to someone who had gone to America.
He rented it out and got income from this.
One day a young lady from the family that owned the house arrived
from America in fancy clothes. A
match was arranged for her: Max Katzop, and off he went with her to
America. Later, word reached
Shumsk that Max and the woman had broken up.
[Marlyn says her father never married the woman; he married Mollie
Barrod in America in 1933.] Then the woman sold the house that Zeev's zadie was
responsible for, without telling him, and this began a rift between Zeev's
family and hers. Eventually
this dispute went to court, and bitterness between the two families
continued -- Zeev remembered that his father was bitter about the
injustice to the zadie. Zeev
was drafted into the Russian army "and didn't think of
opposing", but he remembers others starving themselves for 3-4 months
before they were called so they'd be underweight and not accepted (they'd
eat herring to make themselves thirsty and then not drink enough, and
they'd always be eating sunflower seeds), or getting fake doctor's notes. The draft was formidable because you could be taken for 25
years -- "people would never come back." Zeev
commented on a Betar uniform in Marlyn's possession that may have Zeev
and his wife, Rachel, were teachers in a Tarbut school (the teaching
language was Hebrew) in Shumsk before World War II.
Rachel was from Being
in Russia, Zeev and Rachel survived the war, while Zeev's parents and his
three brothers, Nisson, Shimon and Yakov, perished in the Holocaust.
In 1946, after the war, the orphanage children and staff -- headed
by Zeev & Rachel -- traveled back to Warsaw. They were sent to
Legnietza, not far from Vrozlaw (Breslau in German), in western Poland,
where they refounded the H.N. Bialik Tarbut school. It took about three
months to get the school running, and they ran it through the end of 1949.
The school had 150-160 children, who lived on a kind of kibbutz
(orphanage?). The Communists
tolerated the Tarbut schools for a time. Meanwhile, Zionists were active
getting Jews to Palestine, but the Tarbut schools were costing the Polish
government money, and they did away with them.
Zeev said he was escorted to the school on a Shabbes morning
"and they took everything."
It was one of the last two Tarbut schools to survive. He
applied four times to emigrate and was denied. Then he sent a 120-word
telegram to the Minister of the Exterior explaining his situation, and he
got the permit to emigrate to Israel. He found out later that Mr. Gorin,
husband of the nurse at his school, had interceded. Mr. Gorin was
originally from a shtetl about 40km from Shumsk, in Austria, and had
worked in the Polish government and survived the war. He was a leader of a
Jewish communist group, and had heard Zeev's name come up in connection
with Zionist activity, and he knew Zeev was about to be arrested, and Mr.
Gorin prevented it. Zeev did not even know Mr. Gorin, only his wife. Zeev
and Rachel and their children took a train from Warsaw to Italy -- it was
full of people going to Israel -- and then traveled by ship to Israel.
The voyage took four days and they were seasick during a storm.
Zeev remembered eating some plums and getting sick, and he never
ate plums again. They arrived
in Israel on May 4, 1950. Zeev
said they used to wake up in the middle of the night and couldn't believe
they were in Israel! He said
he knew that sounded made-up and corny,
but it was true. At first
they lived on a kibbutz for a year, then Kfar-Ata, where Rachel had a
sister. They found that
Zeev's second cousins from Shumsk, Yaakov Ben-Arie and Yaakov's sister
Haika (Koren) Waldberg, lived in Kfar Ata too. Later
they settled in Jerusalem. Both Zeev and Rachel continued working as Zeev
became ill toward the end of 1987 and died in August 1988.
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